I celebrate myself, and sing myself

May 31, 2019 6:25 AM

Happy 200th birthday, Walt Whitman! Walt Whitman was born 200 years ago today.

If you can't attend one of the many celebratory events, you can listen to "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry", read by actual Brooklynites, debate his flaws, learn about his hospital work during the Civil War, and view objects associated with him online. And, of course, read some poems by him. A few previous Whitman posts here, here, and here. (Disclaimer: I'm no Whitman scholar. I hope many people will add links.)

posted by ALeaflikeStructure (24 comments total)

YAWP
posted by dywypi at 6:33 AM on May 31, 2019 [12 favorites]

When I had some significant losses recently, my new girlfriend printed off and gave me To Think of Time and it both broke me and healed me. I'm crying at my desk at work just thinking about that poem.

A small part:

To think the thought of death merged in the thought of materials,
To think of all these wonders of city and country, and others taking
great interest in them, and we taking no interest in them.

To think how eager we are in building our houses,
To think others shall be just as eager, and we quite indifferent.

(I see one building the house that serves him a few years, or
seventy or eighty years at most,
I see one building the house that serves him longer than that.)

Slow-moving and black lines creep over the whole earth—they
never cease—they are the burial lines,
He that was President was buried, and he that is now President
shall surely be buried.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 6:46 AM on May 31, 2019 [5 favorites]

The Memory Palace, my favorite podcast, posted a lovely reading of Song of Myself on the evening of the 2016 election. I just listened to it instead of the news for the first few days after said election.

Stitcher Link
Spotify Link
posted by MengerSponge at 6:59 AM on May 31, 2019 [2 favorites]

I picked an armload of lilacs yesterday and thought of Whitman. I Sing the Body Electric was set to music for Fame; I really like it which is good because it will be an earworm at least for the day. Thanks for posting.
posted by theora55 at 7:08 AM on May 31, 2019 [3 favorites]

"And it takes a night and a girl
And a book of this kind
A long long time to find its way back"
posted by entropicamericana at 7:13 AM on May 31, 2019 [3 favorites]

Walt Whitman has escaped.
posted by phooky at 7:14 AM on May 31, 2019 [8 favorites]

Also really worth checking out is Whitman, Alabama, which is a documentary of people across Alabama reciting Song of Myself, interrupted with interviews/profiles of the reciters. It's gorgeous. (previously)
posted by bassooner at 7:14 AM on May 31, 2019 [4 favorites]

"What Do You Call Free Love? There’s No Other Kind of Love"
On Walt Whitman, Unsung Newspaperman
posted by chavenet at 7:23 AM on May 31, 2019 [1 favorite]

"And it takes a night and a girl
And a book of this kind
A long long time to find its way back"

I did not see that coming at all. Thanks for posting. Not only a great song, but it somehow reminded me of two Annie Savoy quotes from Bull Durham.

Sometimes when I've got a ballplayer alone, I'll just read Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman to him. And the guys are so sweet, they always stay and listen. Of course, a guy'll listen to anything if he thinks it's foreplay.

Walt Whitman once said, "I see great things in baseball. It's our game, the American game. It will repair our losses and be a blessing to us."
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 7:50 AM on May 31, 2019 [1 favorite]

the end of my wedding vows was the last stanza of "Song of the Open Road":

Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?
posted by dismas at 7:52 AM on May 31, 2019 [10 favorites]

A wonderful time to relate one of my favorites

Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde (almost certainly) had sex...

Stoddart tactfully left the two poets alone. ‘If you are willing – will excuse me – I will go off for an hour or so – come back again – leaving you together,’ he said. ‘We would be glad to have you stay,’ Whitman replied. ‘But do not feel to come back in an hour. Don’t come for two or three.’ Whitman opened a bottle of elderberry wine and he and Oscar drank it all before Whitman suggested they go upstairs to his ‘den’ on the third floor where, he told Oscar, ‘We could be on ‘thee and thou’ terms.’

...

Oscar told Ives that there was ‘no doubt’ about Whitman’s sexual tastes. ‘I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips,’ he boasted.

posted by lazaruslong at 8:24 AM on May 31, 2019 [6 favorites]

Whitman, Melville, and Baseball
and
America's Hurrah Game [PDF]
posted by chavenet at 8:25 AM on May 31, 2019

Incidentally, being on "thee and thou terms" is my fav euphemism for steamy times
posted by lazaruslong at 8:26 AM on May 31, 2019 [5 favorites]

I always forget that Walt and I share a birthday. He was my age when he wrote this line from "Thoughts."

Of criminals—To me, any judge, or any juror, is
    equally criminal—and any reputable person is
    also—and the President is also.

posted by rikschell at 8:50 AM on May 31, 2019

When I read the book, the biography famous,
And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man's life?
And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life?
As if any man really knew aught of my life,
Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life,
Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clues and indirections
I seek for my own use to trace out here.
posted by stinkfoot at 8:52 AM on May 31, 2019 [3 favorites]

Kris Delmhorst's album Strange Conversation is a collection of songs based on poems. "Light of the Light" is derived from "Passage To India." Her solo concert version is also good.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:22 AM on May 31, 2019 [1 favorite]

James Adomian's Walt Whitman characterization on Dead Authors was both somehow affectionate and devastating

http://thedeadauthorspodcast.libsyn.com/chapter-28-walt-whitman-featuring-james-adomian
posted by anazgnos at 9:30 AM on May 31, 2019 [1 favorite]

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

- Walt Whitman
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 9:34 AM on May 31, 2019 [2 favorites]

If you have an amazon smart speaker, you can ask it to read you a walt whitman poem. Which is pretty nifty. Until it times out on a longer one, and goes straight from the poem to "Sorry, I'm having trouble understanding you right now. Please try a little later" without skipping a beat. Like it is just another line to finish up the poem.
posted by jeribus at 11:46 AM on May 31, 2019

re: When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

And I said to the grass, "Fuckin' magnets, how do they work?"


(I kid because I love. When my junior year English teacher showed us the 6th canto from Song of Myself, my brain and heart bust open:)
posted by HeroZero at 12:44 PM on May 31, 2019 [5 favorites]

One time I had a dream that I was improving upon Whitman's verses by adding "Piper" and "Swiper" and "Hyper" in turn at the end of every line of Song of Myself to make it rhyme. In my dream I thought I was a fucking genius.

I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake, PIPER!
posted by MiraK at 1:56 PM on May 31, 2019

Every Atom project from Martín Espada and The North American Review.

MOOC on "Song of Myself" from the University of Iowa's International Writing Program back in 2014.

I wish I could show you the drawing of Wolf Whitman Lauren Haldeman posted on Facebook this morning, but it'll be in her next book (gosh, sorry this post is so name-droppy).
--
This morning I had a few hours off because my kid's school ended at 10:55 am for the year because the world is crazy, so I sat around reading bits of "Song of Myself" from the 1855 edition from my edition from college and graduate school with all my underlinings and annotations from when I was 22 and 26. Perhaps the best of these was this, from a seminar I took circa 2002 with Dean Young : "Whitman was the ultimate 'I'm okay—you're okay' poet"—DY
posted by newrambler at 2:47 PM on May 31, 2019

Mark Twain wrote quite a letter to him for Whitman's 70th birthday.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:27 PM on May 31, 2019 [1 favorite]

From the Boston Review: On the poet’s bicentennial, we will see praise for his political idealism and gauzy reclamations of him as an LGBT ancestor. But it remains difficult to talk about the connection he saw between patriotism and his love of young men.
posted by Tasmanian_Kris at 5:05 AM on June 2, 2019